T 
population occupying some of the older States, a considerable 
amount of duplication is permissible. Yet our higher institu- 
tions of learning, or rather the numberless sickly children 
carefully nursed under the name of Universities in every State 
of the Union, present a spectacle of scientific impracticability 
and a waste of resources foreign to the hard-headed and thrifty 
American methods in other directions. Germany, with its old 
population, boasts but a fraction of the number of our universi- 
ties, where collections and laboratories in every department of 
science only lead a languishing existence, and from want either 
of co-operation or of centralization do not produce results in 
the least commensurate with the expenditures. The good ef- 
fects of genuine competition are felt as keenly in scientific 
matters as in business circles, but the mere parallelling, for the 
sake of local prejudices, of an older institution, if I may be 
allowed to borrow this expression from another field, is as dis- 
astrous as it is wasteful. No institution can abandon a well 
considered and original policy, because a neighbor chooses to do 
the same thing somewhat later. Fortunately, it matters little 
in scientific matters where the progress is made, as long as the 
thing is accomplished. Methods and aims have of late years 
changed so rapidly, that the managers of older establishments 
may be pardoned at feeling somewhat discouraged if their plans 
have become antiquated before they are fully carried out. 
A school of Natural History such as was contemplated by the 
founder of this Museum not only needs collections, libraries, 
an ample fund for its publications, a large staff of teachers, 
and the necessary buildings for storage and for its laboratories ; 
but it also needs in the field and on the sea facilities for ever 
renewing its contact with nature itself, without which the work 
of its teachers would soon pass into that of the closet naturalist, 
and their instruction lose its stimulus. It is in this direction that 
we may yet hope to unite as far as practicable the forces in the 
field and on the sea-shore. In connection with the Laboratory 
of the United States Fish Commission, the Universities of the 
country might found a seaside laboratory which would render 
unnecessary, except for special work, the various establishments 
already under way along our coast. Those States which from 
a geological or biological point of view present an interesting 
field of study could be visited in succession, in accordance with 
